


As Simple As

by Meduseld



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Also pairing tags for Turn are weird friends, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Ambiguous Relationships, F/M, M/M, Multi, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, they all love each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-19
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-16 03:12:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11245131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meduseld/pseuds/Meduseld
Summary: A world with soul marks doesn’t make it easier to be soulmates. (Or Anna Abe Ben and Caleb take a while to find each other).





	As Simple As

For Caleb it’s always been simple.

His soul mark develops first, a gilded cross, like the one on the cover of Reverend Tallmadge’s bible.

His uncle Lucas, all he has since his father died and his mother followed her soulmate into the grave, suggests he may be meant to take the cloth. Caleb laughs.

The cross is the gold of Ben’s hair. It’s traced in the same blue like his eyes. So familiar to him that the mark stretches across the back of his right hand.

Ben doesn’t have a soul mark, yet, but he’s not afraid to wait. He’s been waiting for his friends to catch up his whole life, always the first to be tall enough to climb trees or shave. It’s his place to clear the way.

At least until Ben goes off to Yale without a soul mark or a backward glance.

Uncle Lucas puts a frail hand on his shoulder with a sympathetic smile: “Not all bonds are equal, Caleb”. On his wrist there is a small sunflower.

Caleb joins a whaling ship to Greenland and when the crew points at his hand and asks if he should be in church, he laughs and sets about out sailing, out fighting and out drinking them all.

It’s only sometimes, when he’s been drinking and feeling maudlin that he talks about a fair girl back home, the faithful preacher’s daughter his hand is meant for, when he finds his fortune. It’s only half a lie.

~

Abraham has known, from the moment he understood what a soul mark was, that he doesn’t want one.

His father spends most days with a frown, rubbing the needle that runs along his left ring finger, eyes pointed towards the cemetery where his mother lies. Hers had been a quill, in the same place, and Abraham used watch it while she worked.

When she’d died, Abraham had been afraid that he’d follow, like the Brewsters, but there’s another mark at the base of his father’s thumb. An oyster, he thinks, and he suddenly can’t eat them anymore. It makes him angry when he glimpses it.

Their fights at the table get more and more frequent, comparisons to his calm, gentle brother more common.  Abe thinks it proves his point that it is better to be Bare, like Thomas.

Thomas has got a marriage arranged, to a sweet girl named Mary, whose mark matched her twin sister. The other Smith girl passed away from fever, and like many bonded to family, Mary had endured. Abe meets her once, and finds there are shadows in her smiles. He asks God to spare him the pain of a bond. God doesn’t listen.

Three days after Ben leaves, and Caleb vanishes, his own mark blooms near his right elbow.

A-B-C, clear as if it was written in the school master’s book.

~

Not every soul mark is twinned, says her mother as she stitches, the ship’s oar mark on her cheek catching the firelight. Not every soul mark means marriage, says her father, a farmer who has never shown his mark.

And early soul marks, her grandmother mutters, are a bad omen. A sickle stretches across her neck. Once, as a girl, she’d asked if it hurt and the old woman had laughed herself sick.

They’re trying to tell her something, but they know she can’t quite understand it, and it lurks in the corner of their eyes and mouths when she comes home muddy from playing in the creek with the boys.

They’re trying to protect her, but what is there to protect from?

Wouldn’t they be happy if her mark showed the apples Caleb juggles, or the rush of wind as Ben twirls her until they collapse, or the curve of Abraham’s smile?

Her grandmother grimaces and tells her to repent, that God will take her certainty as vanity. Only He governs the soul and its bonds.

It’s not until Abraham shows her his mark with an ashy smile, the first letter far darker than the other two, and her own skin still blank as a newborn’s, that she thinks this might be what they were warning her about.

That this is why her grandmother laughed.

The memory of that raspy sound makes it easier to bear when Abraham takes shy, mourning Mary Smith as a bride instead.

Selah Strong walks her home from the church when the ceremony’s over. He’s Bare too.

~

Samuel’s mark develops early, alongside Sarah’s. It’s rare but not unheard of, and their marriage is arranged years before it could ever take place. Benjamin tries to be happy for him.

His own soul mark has not come along, but he holds to hope. He has to.

When it doesn’t come he flees to Yale. It’s strange to be there, missing his friends like a limb, but there is no one to gossip about soul marks and no one to wonder why he would take so long and his brother so little. He can breathe there.

There are events and debates and parties. There is Nathan Hale, with skin as bare as Ben’s. And there is talk of rebellion, of freedom, and Ben puts on a uniform as blue as his eyes.

It is muddy and dirty and ruined on the day he runs from Queen’s Rangers and gets shot.

When he is back in his own camp, and his wounds have been tended to, he tries to wash. It takes him a moment to realize that his left palm isn’t dirty. It’s marked.

Once, in a dusty shop in New Haven, he’d seen the gaping maw of shark’s jaws, buried in the back amongst old broken whaling spears and head spades. It’s those jaws which now stare out from his skin. They stretch as wide as his entire palm, enough to cover someone’s hand in his.

In his relief, he starts to cry.

~  

Abraham makes a choice, and fills a boat with cabbages.

As he sits in a cell, staring into Ben’s eyes with a scratch from Caleb’s beard on his cheek, Anna Strong pours beer as three flowers: daffodil, yarrow, and a deeply red rose, bloom across her shoulders.

**Author's Note:**

> If there’s any confusion, there can be platonic soulmarks and one way bonds; and your guess is as good as mine as to what exactly theirs is. 
> 
> It’s hard to determine whether someone is really Bare or just late, but people seem to know instinctively (aka why Ben doesn’t identify as Bare but Selah does). 
> 
> About the flowers: yarrow is a hardy plant once known as herbal militaris, for its use in staunching the flow of blood from wounds, the daffodil is regard and chivalry and indicative of rebirth, new beginnings and eternal life, and the red rose is love and passion. Guess which is which. 
> 
> Details that didn’t quite fit into the text: the hinges of the shark’s jaws have tiny a’s. The coloring of Caleb’s cross also nods to the A’s. And yes, I’m a dork and the A in ABC is both Anna and Abe. And, sadly Sam’s early bond is due to his early death.


End file.
